Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Integration platform set for cloud, on-premise and hybrid setups

Integration platform set for cloud, on-premise and hybrid setups

Open source software house Talend has extended its unified integration platform work with Talend Cloud, which is said to support on-premise, elastic cloud or hybrid integrations. Launched at last week's Cloud Computing Expo in New York City, the Talend Cloud provides a deployment mechanism, a runtime, a monitoring console for management, and a shared metadata repository.

Like its on-premise brother, the cloud offering is said to support connectors for a variety of data sources and applications. Talend's lineage in distributed computing positions its products to perform in the cloud domain, claims Pat Walsh, vice president of marketing for Talend's recently formed application integration division.

Walsh said the release builds on the company's unified platform, rolled out in May. This was the data integration specialist's first major combined release since its purchase late last year of open source ESB maker Sopera. That company was, in effect, a spin off from SOA pioneer Deutsche Post. The former Sopera's software uses Eclipse for tooling, an Apache CXF framework, CAMEL-based mediation routing and an Active MQ message broker.

The combined platform, Walsh said, points to emerging trends showing the convergence of data and application integration software suites. The unified platform provides a common environment for managing the services through the full application life cycle. It includes a graphical user interface for development.

The Sopera ESB is a good fit with Talend's data integration software, including its Master Data Management software, said Walsh. "The ESB is the enabler for Web services that would share data integration and [Master Data Management] tasks and jobs. The unified platform brings together those technologies," he said, pointing to common Eclipse-based developer tools, as well as deployment tools, management tools and the shared runtime environment.

Common tooling could become more important when and if hybrid cloud offerings expand. Hybrid clouds are an important step for cloud architecture, Walsh suggests, because data and processing requirements vary. ''We see often that people are sensitive to the data, so they retain the data on premise,'' he said. ''But they are happy to outsource the processing on some of that data."